Samar Mohamed Magdy


2024

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Casablanca: Data and Models for Multidialectal Arabic Speech Recognition
Bashar Talafha | Karima Kadaoui | Samar Mohamed Magdy | Mariem Habiboullah | Chafei Mohamed Chafei | Ahmed Oumar El-Shangiti | Hiba Zayed | Mohamedou Cheikh Tourad | Rahaf Alhamouri | Rwaa Assi | Aisha Alraeesi | Hour Mohamed | Fakhraddin Alwajih | Abdelrahman Mohamed | Abdellah El Mekki | El Moatez Billah Nagoudi | Benelhadj Djelloul Mama Saadia | Hamzah A. Alsayadi | Walid Al-Dhabyani | Sara Shatnawi | Yasir Ech-chammakhy | Amal Makouar | Yousra Berrachedi | Mustafa Jarrar | Shady Shehata | Ismail Berrada | Muhammad Abdul-Mageed
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

In spite of the recent progress in speech processing, the majority of world languages and dialects remain uncovered. This situation only furthers an already wide technological divide, thereby hindering technological and socioeconomic inclusion. This challenge is largely due to the absence of datasets that can empower diverse speech systems. In this paper, we seek to mitigate this obstacle for a number of Arabic dialects by presenting Casablanca, a large-scale community-driven effort to collect and transcribe a multi-dialectal Arabic dataset. The dataset covers eight dialects: Algerian, Egyptian, Emirati, Jordanian, Mauritanian, Moroccan, Palestinian, and Yemeni, and includes annotations for transcription, gender, dialect, and code-switching. We also develop a number of strong baselines exploiting Casablanca. The project page for Casablanca is accessible at: www.dlnlp.ai/speech/casablanca.

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Gazelle: An Instruction Dataset for Arabic Writing Assistance
Samar Mohamed Magdy | Fakhraddin Alwajih | Sang Yun Kwon | Reem Abdel-Salam | Muhammad Abdul-Mageed
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024

Writing has long been considered a hallmark of human intelligence and remains a pinnacle task for artificial intelligence (AI) due to the intricate cognitive processes involved. Recently, rapid advancements in generative AI, particularly through the development of Large Language Models (LLMs), have significantly transformed the landscape of writing assistance. However, underrepresented languages like Arabic encounter significant challenges in the development of advanced AI writing tools, largely due to the limited availability of data. This scarcity constrains the training of effective models, impeding the creation of sophisticated writing assistance technologies. To address these issues, we present *Gazelle*, a comprehensive dataset for Arabic writing assistance. In addition, we offer an evaluation framework designed to enhance Arabic writing assistance tools. Our human evaluation of leading LLMs, including GPT-**4**, GPT-**4o**, Cohere Command R+, and Gemini **1.5** Pro, highlights their respective strengths and limitations in addressing the challenges of Arabic writing. Our findings underscore the need for continuous model training and dataset enrichment to manage the complexities of Arabic language processing, paving the way for more effective AI-powered Arabic writing tools